Optical Gyro Tech for Autonomy in Defense – Digital CxO Podcast EP111

Hello, and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Razani, and with me today is Mario Paniccia. He is the CEO of an photo tonics.

How are you? Hi, nice to meet you, Amanda. Good to see you again.

Happy new year to see you. Yes. Happy New Year.

So we have been on the show before. Can you share a little bit with our audience though, about anello and what y'all are providing and working on maybe a little bit about what we talked about last time and then we can move on? Sure.

So here at Anello, what we've done is we've created, there's two types of gyros. There's a MEMS based gyro that's in your phone and your watch, your EarPods that measures gyros measure position and rotation. Uh, um, and so these are billions, you know, billions of units a year.

They're not very expensive, but they're not very accurate. And then on the high end, there's these fiber gyros, right? This is a 3D print of a fiber optic gyro.

It's about 30, $40,000, but it's used for the high end fighter jets, submarines, ICBMs. And what we do is the world is moving autonomous. We want more and more precision, but you can't afford the big, bulky, expensive thing.

So what we've done is we've created the world's smallest fiber optic gyro on a chip, as we call sfog silicon photonics, optical gyro. 3 volts, but it has the same precision of the fiber gyro, but it's based on integrated silicon photonics. This is the same silicon that's used for integrated circuits.

So we fabricate these devices in the same factories and fab fabrication facilities as integrated circuits. We put this with some electronics around there, and then we have a little laser in there that shoots light into this chip. And now we can very accurately measure position or rotation.

We then put that in the systems. And if I put three of those into a cube, you can sort of see here three, you now have a three Actis. This is for things that fly drones.

And just to compare, this is, uh, a 3D print of an LN 200. This is our X three. You can see here, size, weight, area, power, right?

It's a third, the fourth to size, fifth to weight, fifth to power, same performance. Um, and this allows you now to bring that what was previously higher performance capability into smaller things and bigger markets, right? Higher volume.

So obviously drones, this is a use case here. We have land vehicles. This is a, a, a unit we call Gen SS in as GPS chips.

It's a sealed unit, salt spray. We're shipping this into construction for land vehicles. The heading matters.

So while you're moving around on the ground, you're still constrained your wheels unless you have a flying car. We're not there yet. Um, and so it's the heading is the key.

So this has one optical gyro technology in the, in the drive axis. So here we're doing and shipping to construction, farming, agriculture. And then we have another product, um, that we use for, uh, robots that is similar.

But if you're already indoors, there's no GPS. And this is a unit that we're shipping into, uh, construction robots and harden things. Um, and so this is now about being able to navigate with GPS or more importantly, when you lose G-P-S-G-P-S constrained GPS denied or GPS spoofed environments.

And what we have, because you have this high precision gyro, you combine that into a box with CPUs and algorithms, and we have algorithms that say, Hey, we're driving, for example, and I'm starting to lose GPS, whether it's a canyon, urban canyon, downtown barns, orchards for agriculture, mines for, uh, for construction. As you start to lose GPS, well, algorithm says, Hey, we're losing GPS weigh the algorithm more and more on the anello technology, and now we can navigate for extended periods of time without GPS, I can imagine this being used for, um, mapping underground unexplored tunnels and caves, or, uh, finding people that are trapped in, you know, tunnels and caves with putting this into little drones. Yes.

And so what we're doing is we started off as an industrial, uh, application construction farming. Uh, then there's a bunch of interest that's happening with the DOD. So if you're in conflict areas in Afghan, if, uh, you know, Ukraine or Israel today, all the GPS is jammed or spoofed.

If you take your phone in, in Israel today, it sends you to Beirut, right? It's all being jammed and spoofed. And then there's all these other use cases that your indoor buildings, right?

We're talking about, uh, uh, uh, a handheld unit for, for soldiers or emergency, uh, people that go into buildings that you can't find. You gave a perfect use case is that whether it's underground or underwater, six feet underwater, there's no GPS. You can start going into tunnels, um, whether it's search and rescue or other things you wanna navigate.

So we brought this capability now that we can navigate extended periods of time, like we're talking 30, 60 minutes of navigation at a price points that you previously couldn't think of and, and form factors. So there's a perfect example. And what really excites me when I do these interviews when we talk to customers, is as we announce these, uh, advances, and I'll talk about a new product we just announced, people and customers come to us and say, Hey, we have this use case, right?

An example, we have robots that we put in the tunnels, and we wanna know where in certain places in the tunnel. And if you have a tunnel that's dark, that looks the same, cameras don't help, LIDAR doesn't help, right? Because the image is the same, there's no features.

So how do we know where we're going in terms of position? How do you know where you start? And so these are use cases, um, that we're finding all enabled by this, you know, wonderful thing which we call sfo, which was this breakthrough that we developed that, uh, this, you know, team here, uh, has developed over the last couple years.

Fantastic. So now tell me a little bit about the new product. Product.

Okay, so I said what we had before, we have stuff for land, right? This is our vehicles. We're shipping robots, which are, these are also somewhat land, these are robots on the ground air, which we launched last year.

This is the X three product, which predominantly for drones and things that fly. And now we just launched a product, cs, which we call our maritime product. So this is now for things that are above water.

Thinking about this, you're bouncing around and there's this new activity of, of USBs unmanned surface vessels. That seems to be a very high interest. Now that's the same thing.

If you're in a, you're, you're an unmanned vessel, and on the ocean, cameras don't help you, right? It all looks the same. You can go 360 degrees, you can use lidar, maybe you can use the stars.

What we've done here is we've taken our sfog, but three of these in here. So it's the same concept as the cube. But in addition, we've created a navigation system.

So this has two GPS chips where we actually have GPS, it's a sealed unit. We have a, a navigation system and, and, and software in here. And this now it's also watertight and sealed.

So now we can actually navigate on the water. We have algorithms that take into account currents and drifts, but also allows, the reason the three axis is depending on the speed of the boat that you're using, you know, there's some of the smaller boats that go two to four knots. There's the bigger boats that go, 15 to 20 knots, you're bouncing around.

But now we can operate and navigate, um, on the water or underwater with anello slog technology and operating in GPS denied or contested or spoofed environments. Fantastic. So can you give an, uh, any examples of, uh, real world use cases This is already being used in?

Yeah, so we're just launched the product. We're, we'll have samples. There's quite a bit of interest.

We're launching engineering. We have test boxes that we've shipped, uh, that customers have been testing with. And then we, we launching this product ramping up in Q2 with early engineering samples.

And in full production in the fall, uh, the interest level's quite high, but we've taken our technology, for example, just recently at, uh, west 25, which is an event, uh, was put on in San Diego, I think January 27th, January 28th. Um, this was in conjunction with a partnership with Saab, SAAB. If your readers go and look up, uh, on our LinkedIn posts at Anella photonics, we can look at our website, or if you go to a Saab, uh, this is in partnership with scpa, which is their, uh, innovation group.

We put our technology on their boat. This was then sent out on, you know, people were watching real time. We sent the boat out, you know, many, many miles out on the ocean from San Diego.

Turned off the GPS, and then we navigated back in based solely on Anello. And we were talking, I think 30 or so miles of navigation, or kilometers I think I should say, with less than 1% error. Um, when we came back into the dock, you know, we sort of measured how far we were off with the turning on off GPS now in San Diego, the testing was done by just disconnecting the antennas, right?

We're not in a, a contestant environment. The same technology and partnership with Naval X and Task Force 59, uh, this is a, a navy a task force 59 is the innovation unit of the Navy that's out in Bahrain, out in the Middle East. Our technology was flown out there was then flown to Jordan, and then we had a partnership with Seasat, where they have a UUV unmanned surface vessel, USV, sorry.

And it was just driven up to the tip of Israel and the Navy that was falling behind it. People's phones were, we could tell when they were being spoofed, we detected the spoofing. So spoofing is when you can still get, there's two things.

Jamming is when you lose satellite signal and you can sort of tell that, you can tell by number of signals. The number of satellites. The weakness spoofing is you get GPS signal, but you don't know if it's real or not, good or not.

And so what we can do here, because we have real time information, we compare every 10 milliseconds. What is the position that Anella says and what is the position that GPS has? And for example, in this case here, we were navigating and we were getting close to Israel, and the, the spoofing detected that all of a sudden GPS says, you're in ABA Jordan Airport, or, uh, I, I think ABA is a base.

You were at the Ahad airport, which was 300 kilometers away. We immediately detected it. We said, Hey, we're being spoofed, poured over to Anello.

And then we navigated. There was just some testing that was done by taskforce 59. And there's an example in a real environment that our technology technology has been tested and we navigate solely based on Anello.

So it's quite exciting. And there's a few more customers that are doing testing that are not public. Um, but you know, we now have, you know, land, which we've been, you know, there's a product.

We shipped it a year and a half ago. We introduced the three axis product specifically for drones. And we have lots of customers testing, unfortunately lot customers aren't public.

Um, and then we just launched a maritime product that is a combination of testing we've done with customers, both in field trials with Naval X, with other customers out in San Diego on the East coast and Rhode Island. And then some of this is actually being shipped over the next quarter. We have about six or seven pretty big customers testing this in field trials.

And then looking at, uh, ramping that into production, uh, in the summer and then ramping through the fall. So, quite exciting again. Yes.

All based on this little thing called sip fog, silicon photonics, optical gyro. Absolutely. It sounds like your technology is making a large impact around the world.

Yes. And you know, I think, uh, as you said earlier, what's really exciting is, if you think about it, we thought about maritime a year ago. There was a bunch of interest over the summer.

Uh, people came to us and we said, Hey, we can build something. We build a test box first. That took, you know, a combination of the X three a, a discreet board for GPS, a discrete board for our navigation software.

And then as that evolved where there was interest, we ended up building a real product. And this is, you know, like I said earlier, the real excitement of working with customers, putting it our technology onto real use cases, and then together with the customer, building a product that's optimized for the use case. And I think from the schedule I just showed you, also gives you a sense of how fast and nimble we are, how we're really customer focused.

And you know, I urge any of your customers that are listening, if you have new use cases or new applications, you know, I think between these three products or derivatives, we can find how we can quickly app adapt our technology. Maybe it's tweaking the algorithms or maybe, you know, obviously every boat is different. Every USB is different, every land vehicle, but you know, 90% of it is the same.

And then we can work with the customer to tweak the, the algorithms. And also these are, these are designed to be very easy to install, 15, 20 minutes, put it in, there's standard interfaces, there's no proprietary, uh, interfaces. So we, we try to make this as, as easy to use, easy to install, and, and then take it out to the, to the, to the mass market So you can custom build for a client, You know, if there's a business case that that's makes sense.

Absolutely. Right. And um, we have, uh, one or two projects that are slightly taking our existing product and then we, we do some custom stuff for customers.

Yes. So what's next? Do you have anything in the works for the future?

Is there any reason you would try to get even smaller for any reason? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of the first thing is just, you know, we're ramping up, we just raised the funding round, um, and we're ramping up our existing product portfolio and bringing this new customer on the new product line and then ramping that into production. So there's a lot of stuff happening here, but if you wanna look forward, you know, we, we are here in Silicon Valley, it's not, uh, uh, the Wizard of Oz in Kansas or something.

But you know, this is, you know, this is unfortunately the, the beat we live on, this is the state of the art today. This is a 3D printer of Allen 200. This is an ELLOS X three, which we just launched and I think you set me up, but this is our next generation, right?

Oh wow. Yes. We're talking about shrinking the X three to even the smaller.

So this is something that's in our, our roadmap. It's not something we're focused on today, but this is something that we've had from customers of how do we scale it? And this is something probably in the next three plus years, you know, we have a roadmap that we continue, as you said, we're gonna continue to reduce power, we're gonna continue to reduce size.

And as you shrink those, you end up with something. And by the way, we don't trade off on performance. So this is talking about something one inch square from a two by two, you know, eight times smaller, uh, fifth, maybe half or third, the power, same performance.

So what this does is opens up new applications, right? Things you want the same precision, but maybe you want on consumer drones, or maybe you want it on, you know, handheld and personal people that can carry it or other things. And so as you go smaller, you keep the same performance, but it opens up volume markets.

And this eventually we'll keep integrating and integrating. Eventually we're gonna make it small enough that we'll put it on every phone, on every watch. And then you can track everybody anytime, any place.

Not track, but you can use it to navigate with everything you do with the same precision, whether you're in contested GPS denied or not environments. Alright, great. So if someone wanted to reach out to you, uh, where would they go?

Can you give the, the web address? com, all one word. com.

There's a, a, a link there for info. Uh, you can download the spec sheets, get on our mailing list. There's a also pull down for mailing list.

And then if you have any questions or applications, we look at that every day on the info page. And then we usually send it off to our applications engineer, depending on the topic. And someone will get back to you and, um, look forward to hearing from you and more importantly, look forward to seeing how Anello can solve your navigation solutions.

Alright, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all about these products. Well first of all, thank you, Amanda, for, for having us back on and look forward to, to hearing more from you and in the future.

We'll keep you updated when new stuff comes out, but I look forward to talking to your viewers and your customers and our future customers. How's that? And thanks to our audience, stay tuned.

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